Thursday, November 11, 2010

The first order of business is to explain what this blog's for and why you should care.

I'm writing about auxlangs, that is, artificial languages for use between people of different linguistic backgrounds. I'm familiar with the major ones and the more promising new ones, and I'm relatively neutral--I don't ultimately favor any one of them, partly because I believe in a multiple-auxlang scenario (a few widely-used auxlangs) instead of what's sometimes called the One Ring or Highlander solution, where one auxlang wins out and becomes the single second language for everyone.

So I'll compare and comment on different auxlangs. If you have a question, go ahead and ask in a comment.

Why should you care? Well, since you're reading this, you have at least some competence in English and may think you need nothing else.

That's almost right. But even ignoring apocalyptic scenarios in which the Chinese (Muslims, Wombats from Atlantis...) derail English linguistic hegemony and force us to learn their favored language instead of learning ours as they should--even ignoring that, there is the simple fact that English is rather hard to learn well. Call your computer's tech support if you need an example.

What's needed is a language everyone can learn to fluency without a lot of trouble. And that's an auxlang. And since people have different needs and abilities, it's actually more than one auxlang, because each one has its strengths and weaknesses. I'll even help you figure out which one is the best fit for you.